Landscape with Salmacis and Hermaphroditus

In Ovid's Metamorphoses the water nymph Salmacis falls for the youth Hermaphroditus when he comes to her pool. She watches him undress and swim, then dives in and clings to him, and at her prayer the gods fuse the two into a single body. Lagrenée painted the watching. Salmacis is the figure in the foreground, and Hermaphroditus bathes further back on the right.

For a long time the story was hard to read. Before a restoration the picture was known simply as a Bather, because the youth in the background could barely be seen. Lagrenée had shown it at the Paris Salon of 1773, the Académie royale's exhibition in the Louvre, where the Comte de Chabot bought it from him for 600 livres. It is small, oil on copper, about 38 by 30 centimetres.

In 1923 M.J.F.W. van der Haagen of The Hague gave it to the Mauritshuis, which owns it and hangs it in the Gallery Prince Willem V.